Heaven on Earth - Love your enemy

 

We’re continuing our journey through Matthew’s biography of Jesus. Alex Griffin did a great job last week of providing us with an overview of what is contained in the chapters we’re looking at. If you missed his talk, look on the website where you’ll find recordings of all the talks in this series, as well as others, under the tab Resources.

The passage we’re looking at today you’ll find in Matthew, Chapter 5, verses 38 to 47. The passage forms part of a collection of the things Jesus taught which is known as the Sermon on the Mount, one of the most famous parts of the Bible. And, as always, the challenge for us as we read this is to strip away that familiarity, to set aside what we think we already know about these passages so that they can impact us again, in a fresh way.

So, let me read you the section, beginning verse 38:

You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

 

This section forms part of a series of short sections which all begin with the words “You have heard it said – do ... this. But I say – do something else.” These different sections are piled one top of the other quite deliberately I think.

On the one hand, as I said last time I stood up here, Jesus makes extensive use of hyperbole, quite deliberately, I think. He is raising the bar on what can be considered good or righteous behaviour to such a level that no-one can keep up anymore. As an example, David Flowers pointed out a few weeks ago that Jesus says it’s not enough not to kill someone, we can’t even call them an idiot. In this passage, we see the same thing. Don’t just let someone else hit you, but actually invite him, or her, to hit you twice by turning your other cheek to them. Don’t just let someone sue you, but give them the very clothes off your back as well.

Why does Jesus lay such a burden on his followers? Unfortunately, that is often how this has been spoken about – as a set of rules that you have to keep, or else be condemned to hell.

But I don’t think that is what Jesus is doing here. Instead, I think that Jesus is trying to ramp up the pressure on those who think of themselves as holy and righteous people – as the kind of people who do very well on keeping God’s commands to the letter – and who therefore are certain that they are accepted by God. This certainty that they are accepted by God allows them then to feel quite proud of themselves, to see themselves as slightly superior to ordinary human beings who aren’t as good at obedience to the law.

Why does Jesus do that? He is trying to make holy people realise that holiness is about more than the keeping of rules. On the one hand, he’s trying to make clear that it is impossible for us to keep the rules as perfectly as we would need to in order to measure up to God’s standard. So, he points out that God doesn’t just want us to love our friends, but that true holiness requires us to love our enemies as well.

That is one of the reasons that Jesus is so angry with the Pharisees. He’s not angry that they want to be holy. He’s not even angry that they don’t manage to be as holy as they need to be – we’ve already noted that perfect holiness is impossible for human beings. He is angry because the Pharisees, who spend so much time on studying God’s word, should have realised themselves that they can’t achieve perfect holiness out of their own strength.

On the other hand, Jesus is desperate for holy people to realise that holiness wasn’t about the perfect keeping of rules in the first place. Instead, holiness is about the quality of our relationships, to God our creator as well as to our fellow human beings. After all, Jesus points out that the summary of the law is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.” Holiness is about love, about keeping in step with our Creator. David Flowers talked about that two weeks ago when he spoke about the cosmic nature of relationships.

And what is the basis of our relationship to our Creator? It isn’t our keeping of rules, or even our love for Him. It is His grace for us, personified in and lived out by Jesus, his only son. It is God’s grace that seeks us out and that brings us back into right relationship with our Father in heaven. And it is God’s grace that keeps seeking us out, even when we turn away.

In that context, it is worth pointing out that the set of rules Jesus talks about here is really rather short, and even incomplete. There’s nothing in the Sermon on the Mount on inheritance law, for example, or on property law, or on international banking, or on democratic governance, or on council tax. All of which are things that it would be handy to know about if you want to run a country successfully. Nor, for that matter, is there anything on these matters in the books of the Old Testament, the books called the Pentateuch, which contained the law that the people of Israel were meant to keep. A few theologians have pointed out that the collection of laws governing the people of Israel was the shortest such list in human history.

Now, the problem this has created is that the church has often been silent on such issues, because they aren’t mentioned overtly in the Bible. Fortunately, some Christians are finally beginning to talk about our obligation to look after the environment, and there are Christian groups which are beginning to protest against human trafficking and slavery, for example. But too much of the church is still silent on issues of abuse of power or the exploitation of the poor. In that sense, the church has often made the same mistake that the Pharisees made. It has turned the examples Jesus provides of what makes for right relationships, and has turned that into a rule book to obey. But, Jesus wasn’t interested in defining a list of do’s and don’ts for a good life. He was desperate to call people back into a right relationship with their Creator and with each other, which is only possible through God’s grace.

Now, this focus on relationships instead of rules is not a cop-out, taking the easier option. Right relationships with people are much harder to establish and to maintain than it is to obey a list of rules. Hopefully, that will become clear as I go on.

It is in this context, of deliberate hyperbole in order to drive home the point that the quality of our relationships matters more than our obedience to the law, that we should try to grasp, to get hold of, what Jesus has to say about enemies. And I think that what Jesus is saying, in effect, is that we, as people beloved and rescued by our Creator, do not have the option to think of anyone else as our enemy, even if, or rather particularly when, he or she treats us as their enemy. Now, how does that work?

One way to understand what Jesus means when he talks about enmity, so the way we become enemies with other people, is to look at the specific audience Jesus was speaking to when he said these things. He is speaking to the people of Israel who had a very specific way of thinking about themselves – that they had a pretty special relationship with the All-mighty Creator of the universe. After all, they believed that that All-mighty God had chosen them as his own people, first through their ancestors Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and then through rescuing them from slavery in Egypt. They were aware that they had lost some of that special relationship through the sin of their forefathers. But, they believed that that same God had promised that one day he would come to save his people again, when he would defeat all their enemies and set the Jewish people up as rulers of the whole earth. All those pagans, the Roman occupiers foremost amongst them, and all the unholy sinners in the land of Israel would face judgement and be swept away into eternal damnation, leaving the world free for the true people of God to enjoy in peace.

So, the people of Israel were pretty clear on who the enemy was – it was the pagans, and the Romans who occupied their lands. It was the sinners in their own ranks, those Jews who did not keep the law and who therefore kept on making God angry, which meant that God kept on delaying his rescue.

The reason Jesus chooses the examples of being sued and being forced to walk with someone for a mile is that he is speaking to an audience of peasants. Peasants at the time were sued and taken advantage of by the rich as a matter of course, and routinely lost these law-suits because they were poor, even when they were in the right. They were also routinely press-ganged into working for the Roman occupiers, as labourers and carriers, without receiving any compensation for it. There was good reason for them to hate the rich and the Romans, to see them as their enemies.

Yet, it is to these people that Jesus says – Love your enemy. Pray for those who persecute you. The person you think of as your enemy isn’t your enemy at all.

How does this apply to us? Who are our enemies?

Perhaps, like me you would reply that we don’t really have enemies. So, a lot depends on how we define who is an enemy. People become potential enemies when we come into conflict with them, so when there is a clash of interests or of view-points or of values. But that doesn’t mean that every person we have a conflict with is automatically an enemy. Something else must be added to the mix in order for that to happen. Someone becomes an enemy when I stop to think of them as worthy of being treated with respect, or dignity, or love. Instead, they become the person I have to fight and to defeat. And usually, it’s the other person who is at fault for the clash.

As a small example – a while ago, my eldest son had to stay home because they had a training day at his school. So, we had to decide who would take time off work to look after him. And before I knew it, I had turned our discussion of schedules and work-commitments into an outright fight over who had more stress at work, and who had to give up more for the family. On top of that, it was a fight I had to win. Eventually, I managed to take a step back and think, “Hang on a second, why am I talking to Birgit as if she is the enemy? How has she become the person I have to fight and to defeat?” So, I think I managed to apologise for how I’d behaved and we could talk more calmly about things. Unsurprisingly, a solution was easy to find. I took my son to the office with me and he watched “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “Cars” on DVD in the Prayer Room while I did my work. It is heart-wrenching, isn’t it, how easy it is to turn the people we love the most into the enemies we fight hardest.

But that’s not all. Jesus says “Love your enemy – turn the other cheek”. Why does he insist on that? Why doesn’t he just say “Try to tolerate people who annoy you, and in a conflict do your best to remain polite”?

The simple answer is that that is not enough. It is not enough to hold back our enmity for as long as the other person doesn’t anger us too much. That isn’t loving our enemy. That’s just setting down some rules for other people to obey if they want to remain our friends. The problem is that once we have set down those rules, we are already preparing the ground for our attack when the rules get broken.

I love movie Westerns. They appeal to the kid in me. And it’s cool to watch stuff blow up in slow motion. But they express this dynamic very well of setting down conditions for people to be our friends. There’s always a bad guy, usually identified by the fact that he wears something unfashionable and sleazy and looks angry all the time. He threatens a few people, maybe even shoots one or two.

Then there is the good guy. He’s also quite often wearing something sleazy and unfashionable and frowns a lot, but he only threatens people who we know are evil. And, for the most part, the good guy doesn’t go round shooting people. Until, that is, the bad guy threatens the girl or tries to blow up the town or does something else dastardly, and suddenly the good guy realises that he is left with no other choice but to fight back. And then the good guy starts to lay waste. I mean, the bad guy might have deluded himself into thinking that he’s good at murder, but he’s not a patch on the good guy, right? Every one of the good guy’s bullets finds its target, he’s worse than the plague and death himself combined. And the film always ends with a particularly gruesome end for the bad guy, the more horrible the better.

And that is, actually, a great illustration for how we behave in circumstances where others might become our enemies – when they, deliberately or not, act in ways that bring them into conflict with us. We try to show some forbearance at first. We attempt to be understanding – maybe the person had some bad news, or maybe they ate a bad curry, or they’re under a lot of pressure at work, or something like that. So we try to give them some credit. But, the longer they persist in their conflict with us, the angrier we get. And soon we stop trying to be understanding and we start to remember all the other times that that person, or someone very much like them, did something unreasonable or said something hurtful to us. And before we know it, we start to fight back, we lash out in word or in action, any way we can, because the other person just doesn’t leave us any choice.

What often emerges only after we already had a fight is that we stopped to respect and love the person we’re in conflict with. In fact, often the refusal to treat others with respect is the root cause for the conflict in the first place. That is why Jesus insists – love your enemies. We can not allow ourselves even to think about enmity, of treating others as our enemies, not even as our last resort, not even when we feel thoroughly justified to do so. Because as soon as we allow that possibility to enter our minds, it gathers pace, it starts to take us over until we find ourselves in the middle of a conflict without necessarily being able to remember how we got there.

Of course, as with all the other things Jesus speaks about in the Sermon on the Mount, we can’t love our enemies on our own. To love our enemies isn’t another command we have to keep. Instead, it is a challenge and encouragement for us to keep on seeking God’s grace. When next we find ourselves treating someone else as our enemy, that’s the point when we turn to Jesus and cry out, “I can’t do this, please help!” And Jesus promises that he will help.

In the last few minutes, let me just approach a very difficult aspect of this problem of enmity, of treating others as the enemy we have to fight. You may have been listening to me and had the thought, “That’s all good and well, Erik, but what of the times when there is real wrong-doing at stake?” I’m afraid I don’t have a good answer to that question. I only have an illustration. I come from South Africa. I grew up under the Apartheid regime, the policy of deliberate segregation of races, and the reservation of 80% of the country’s land and resources for the 5% of the population who was white. Someone called it one of the most evil regimes in human history.

That regime was resisted, most forcibly by the African National Congress, who in the early 1960s decided that violence was the only option left to them. The violence led to thousands and thousands of deaths, mostly of innocent black people caught in the middle. But it didn’t topple the regime. What toppled the regime was the determination of one man, Nelson Mandela, not to see an enemy in the Afrikaner jailors and politicians he encountered. His determination changed everything. There are other examples, the Velvet Revolution in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall and so on.

We also just need to remember that loving our enemies will not be easy. To turn the other cheek does mean that you’ll get slapped twice. Loving our enemies won’t prevent them from harming us. But it does provide the chance for something better to happen than strike and counter-strike.

 

And so. May God bless you with his love for enemies, the kind of love that caused him to become a part of the humanity which hated him, and to lay down his life so that those who hated him might not be destroyed, but might be able to come into good relationship with him again. And as you seek to love your enemies, may you too experience how God’s grace and mercy transforms even the worst circumstances, and allows a garden of love to grow in what was a wasteland of hate.